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No more no more no more no more

Humbly report that most anger mystifies me. It makes me itch. It hurts my head and it hurts my hair, which I don’t have enough of, largely because of how angry every is, and for no good reason! No more no more no more. Not me.

What’s the problem? you’re asking. Well how would you like it if you went out for a walk and some imbecile bumped into you because he was too busy jabbering into a phone? Huh? I know!

I’ll admit, I wasn’t paying as much attention as I ought–I saw a cloud in the shape of a marshmallow Peep, which reminds me–Easter is coming. Easter under the bridge is a rather sad affair, so perhaps I’ll think of something else.

Like the man that bumped into me. Now, any civilized person would just keep on with their walk. Perhaps exchanging a sheepish glance or saying “Sorry sir, oh. sorry.” At the least making eye contact. But once his stinky eye touched my own gaze I knew that this was someone gone mad. Some wretched. Someone who probably made a habit of snipping kittens’ whiskers and chortling like Jabba the Hutt while watching the poor thing run into walls.

Kittens are crap, actually.

Instead of saying “Sorry sir, oh sorry,” he looked up and shoved me. He put his wretched paw on my chest and pushed!

“You better watch yourself,” he said.

His hat was on sideways, which I wouldn’t mention except that it was made of leather. I like the smell of leather but the air pollution was so bad that I coudn’t even smell his hat, even as close as we were to each other. My aunt died in her sleep one night and my uncle still says it’s because of the air quality. He thinks that it’s because of aliens but I think aliens are too smart to use smog as a weapon.

“Why, because your hat’s on sideways?” I asked. I was not as speechless as I had thought.

He touched his hat lightly. One of his fingers had a silver ring on it. It was a pumpkin, but the pumpkin had a face like a skull. An angry skull. Listen: I’m not going to ever wear a ring with a pumpkin on it, I know that much. Especially not if I’m going out for a strut to bump into people.

“That’s not the only reason,” he said, sounding a little defensive. And then he just looked at me and blinked. I wondered vaguely what the other reasons might be. He smelled of syphilis–no, I do not have it, but life under the bridge can be grim–but that wasn’t really something to go around threatening people with.

Maybe he–oh, it doesn’t really matter, I suppose.

“You’re not going to bother me no more,” he said. “No more no more no more no more,” although “more” sounded kind of like “Mo.” My grandmother once spanked me with a wooden spoon for knocking over the television when she was watching the Three Stooges. For some reason, when people say the word “Hairy” I don’t think of Larry, but “Mo” still reminded me of the bald stooge.

I went my way and he went his. I saw a kitten on the way back to the bridge. “You better watch your step,” I said, trying it out.

7 thoughts on “No more no more no more no more”

“No more,” you say? No more, no more, no more, no more? For one who anger apparently mystifies, you certainly tried it on for size rather quickly (that poor kitten) (actually, strike that; kittens are deplorable, and get what is coming to them).

“How would [I] like it?” though, you ask, being pushed by a man on a cell phone? Well, everyone knows that talking on a cell phone gives you cancer, if not malaria (that’s mosquitoes), so he too will get his comeuppance.

Here is what mystifies me: how can an apparent pacifist, who spends his days strolling about with his head in the clouds, looking backward, not forward (I have seen you from my shop window; don’t try to deny it), be infuriated by some inadvertent jostling on a busy sidewalk? Especially from a cell-phone-person, power-trippers to a man (having read every book there is on “how to be more confident,” and “who moved [their] cheese”), as everyone that is anyone would know. At least he did not use any offensive language.

Once, when I was a mailman for a week, I had a similar encounter with an old woman on one of those motorized scooters. Here I was, genuinely minding my own business, when she came tearing down the sidewalk, at speeds well over 7 miles an hour. Unlike you (I suspect), I made an honest effort to get out of her way, but to no avail. She ran over my big toe (which to this day has never healed properly), cursed me a blue-streak, and then gave me a cane lashing that would have done Singapore proud.

“Put it down,” I said, referencing the cane with a shaky finger, through my tears, “or I will notify the authorities.”
“Oh yeah?” responded the old woman, with a leer (or at least I think it was a leer; she was wearing the darkest pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses I had ever seen). “I’m not afraid of your uniform.”
“You are not a nice person,” was all I could muster.
“Yeah, yeah,” she responded derisively. “Like I’ve never heard that before.”
Then some men in white jackets came and took her away. Maybe to stick electrodes to her head, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I cannot be certain.

And you think Easter under a bridge is lonely. Try Easter in a candy shop. Loneliness in a crowd carries its own peculiar emptiness: sweets to happy faces all day, then upstairs, to soak my toe, reheat a meatloaf TV dinner, and watch re-runs of Japanese game shows in pure solitude until I sleep (if I can sleep). At least you have the rats.

On these points, I cannot disagree:
(1) A Peep in season is unparalleled in terms of sacchariferous satisfaction (mmmmmm);
(2) No one in a sideways hat, especially made of leather, can or should be taken seriously; and
(3) Kittens.

Not recently, but looking back, I find that certain truths hold true, despite immediate perception, or the passage of any amount of time. From the early ’90s, I will always remember two things with crystal clarity: (1) never to chew gum there, and (2) certain love song lyrics.

Have you ever seen Dazed and Confused? It makes me nostalgic for a time that I was never really a part of. I used to have the soundtrack. I particularly liked “School’s Out” with Alice Cooper and “Lowrider,” of course. If my life had a soundtrack, I could see including those numbers.